Meltwater Partially Wins One Lawsuit, Gets Sued By AP In Another For Daring To Aggregate News

from the don't-promote-us! dept

It's been an interesting day for Meltwater News -- a news aggregator that has been fighting in the UK over claims that it has to pay to aggregate news from the Newspaper Licensing Association. It originally lost its case last year, but successfully got the court today to slash the fees the NLA wanted to charge by 90% (showing just how much some gateekeepers overvalue their own content). Still, as Meltwater notes, the really ridiculous situation is that anyone who aggregates news and links to sources in the UK may now risk having to get a license to do so (even if the licenses won't be nearly as expensive as the NLA would like).

And... merely hours after this ruling in the UK, the Associated Press sued Meltwater over the same basic thing in the US. The AP has always been confused about aggregators and insisted they were illegal -- and has successfully pressured many other ones (including Google and Yahoo) to pay up. Now it's suing Meltwater, claiming that the site is "a parasitic distribution service" and that it "has a significant negative impact on the ability of AP to continue providing the high-quality news reports." To put it mildly, that's ridiculous. If the AP can't continue providing news because Meltwater is aggregating their stories, then the AP deserves to die.

The full lawsuit is embedded below (it's a long one). The AP insists that it's not against aggregators in general (though it suggests that it's really just not against aggregators who pay them). The lawsuit seems to want to pin the general decline of the AP's business model almost entirely on services like Meltwater. Where the AP's argument is stronger is in highlighting that Meltwater does archive full works for subscribers (not for the public). But the details aren't as crazy as the AP would like to suggest they are. It does not appear to make those archived works fully available -- but it does two things. First it just keeps an index so that if you search on terms for AP articles that are no longer online, it tells you that they once existed. That shouldn't be seen as infringement as it's an index and the full articles themselves are not being displayed.

The second archiving issue is that Meltwater lets customers, at their own discretion, archive the text of articles they find. This is no different than tons of other online archiving services like ReadItLater or Instapaper. They don't even make this that easy. A user has to literally cut and paste the content into a box to archive it -- just as they could cut and paste it into an email or a text file. It's difficult to see how that should be pinned on Meltwater, rather than its users.

On top of that, it seems like there's a reasonable fair use argument to be made here: archiving these works for research purposes, not unlike a library would. While the AP does highlight the UK ruling discussed above... it doesn't happen to mention that the UK does not have fair use, while the US does.

While many of the charges are about copyright infringement, the complaint also drags back out a "hot news" claim -- which has suddenly become popular again after years of being considered a totally dormant concept. Of course, so far, hot news claims haven't fared well in court, and I doubt this case will be any different.

First it just keeps an index so that if you search on terms for AP articles that are no longer online, it tells you that they once existed. That shouldn't be seen as infringement as it's an index and the full articles themselves are not being displayed.

The second archiving issue is that Meltwater lets customers, at their own discretion, archive the text of articles they find. This is no different than tons of other online archiving services like ReadItLater or Instapaper. They don't even make this that easy. A user has to literally cut and paste the content into a box to archive it -- just as they could cut and paste it into an email or a text file. It's difficult to see how that should be pinned on Meltwater, rather than its users.

Why, of course people knowing about your product is harmful to you! Events are products, right...?

Also, they can cut and paste our content into emails? Gmail needs to automatically blow up the computers with emails with our content!

(later)

They can tell each other what our content says? Medical centers need to automatically blow up the lungs of people who do this!

If you've already scraped and copied it (meaning its now in your RAM) why would you then save it back on their disk? Everyone should have a home Wiki for things like that. Then they can't take your Wiki from you until they pry the guns from your cold dead fingers.

I doesn't surprise me that AP is back at this again. After all they have won just about every other time out.

I'm still left wondering just how much longer a wire service can survive in the Internet/Web age when it's possible for lots of people to become "reporters".

In the days of telegraph when AP started it was a co-operative that sent stories from one paper to another. These days they'll tell you it ensured journalistic standards and accuracy but a check of 19th century and newspapers up to the beginning of World War II will find a distinct lack of what we consider journalistic standards now and accuracy often seemed secondary.

The Internet is often faster, with people there on the ground and more immediate while television, for now, still holds a video edge. AP's biggest problem is that web sites aren't members of AP and television stations have other news feed arrangements than AP.

Their membership is dwindling, slowly, and the only way they can see to make the money they used to is to brow beat and sue aggrigators into submission.

If I go to an aggregator and it redirects me to a news in your own domain that's double the win. One for the aggregator (you'll see ads in its pages) and one for your news company (I'll see the ads in your page too). But that would require too high of an IQ. And we all know that in the MAFIAA they only hire ppl with IQ below 10.